The present invention relates generally to a system and method for preventing image or photographic capture of an object or image by placing a moving mask in front thereof.
An owner of an object for viewing, such as an art item, a holographic display, or an image on a digital device, may desire to prevent unauthorized image or photographic capture of the object or image by viewers that use camera, screen capture on digital devices, and other capture means.
Information relevant to attempts to address this problem can be found in China Patent Application No. CN 201310186530, U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 20140218402 and 20140218403. However, each one of these references suffers from one or more of the following disadvantages: special hardware requirement, inefficient algorithm that may be slow or burden the computational capacity, and limiting only to screen capture prevention on digital devices.
For example, China Patent Application No. CN 201310186530 describes a method for preventing screen capture on digital devices. The disclosed method divides a screen into two categories that correspond to non-protected area and protected area with the protected area placed in a special protected processor display memory that does not allow screen capture. This method disadvantageously requires digital devices, such as cell phones and computers, to equip with the special protected display memory, which would undesirably increase the cost of digital devices.
U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 20140218402 and 20140218402 describe a screen-capture prevention method in which an image for viewing on digital devices is divided into a plurality of subimages, which are then displayed in rapid succession to recreate the original image. This method and algorithm thereof may be inefficient and may burden the computational power of digital devices, especially hand held devices, such as cell phone, that have limited computational capacity, as shall be discussed in more detail below.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a system and method for preventing image capture that does not require special hardware and that can be implemented in hand held devices which have limited computational capacity.